Security is an important aspect of network communication. User terminals often communicate to servers over secure communication sessions. However, to enforce security policies or regulations, a corporation or a public organization may need to inspect such secure communication sessions passing through a corporation data network or a public data network. Organizations typically deploy one or more security gateways to act as a proxy to the secure communication sessions to intercept secure data and process the secure data according to the security policies.
Despite secure communication sessions often adhering to standards such as a transport layer security (TLS) protocol or a secure socket layer (SSL) protocol, a client device and a server device may exchange additional proprietary information, which does not conform to the protocol, in order to establish a secure session. When such a scenario occurs, security gateways intercepting secure sessions may need to relay the proprietary information between the client device and the server device so as to allow the devices to transmit and receive the proprietary information without being aware of the security gateways.
However, when two or more security gateways are used to process the secure session between the client devices and the server devices in order to enforce the security policies, a first security gateway may be unable to relay information sent between the client device and the server device (e.g., the information uncommon for a SSL protocol) directly to a second security gateway. Therefore, an additional data communication channel is typically established between the first security gateway and the second security gateway to convey the uncommon information. However, creation of the additional data communication channel can result in increased load on the security gateways.